Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [170]
Heather North had stayed with the children, and I am sure she needed a break by the time we got back, but she didn’t really get one. I was wearing a drain so that the waste fluid from the surgery would not collect in my body. It was merely inconvenient, but it did mean that with the surgery and the drain, the children had to keep more distance than they were used to doing, so Heather’s work was not done. In a few days, Dr. Warren took out the drain, but apparently I still had some liquid that should have drained. It collected and collected until I was sloshing everywhere I went. Jack, Cate, and I were watching the NCAA basketball tournament on television that weekend, and every time I moved, I would slosh and Cate would look over at me, frowning. “You need to do something about that,” she said.
I tried to reach Cliff Hudis in New York; he knew the answer to everything, but he wasn’t in, so I did what I had vowed not to do. I got back on to the computer and typed “lumpectomy sloshing” into Google. By the time Cliff called me back, I already knew what it was. I told him I had Googled it. “Googled what?” he asked. “Lumpectomy sloshing.” There was a hearty laugh on the other end of the line. He confirmed that the Internet information was right: it might be uncomfortable and a little embarrassing, but it wasn’t a problem. But it was a lot of liquid. By the time Dr. Warren took it out, a few days later, he had to use every syringe in the little examining room, then root through neighboring rooms for more. As side effects go, it was one of the more amusing ones, which only goes to show how cheerless side effects really are.
It was about this point that I put my foot down. Every conceivable test was being scheduled for me. I wanted to be cautious, but I thought I was getting celebrity treatment—more testing, more caution than was reasonable or usual. One day I canceled a series of tests that they were going to do. “I’m just not doing it,” I said. “If you give these to everyone, fine. If not, I’m not going to do them.” I haven’t gotten a thank-you note from my health insurance carrier yet.
The last step in the fight was radiation, every weekday morning at 7:15. If everything went smoothly, I was back home before the children left for school—but that happened only about half the time. Sometimes the machines were slow in warming up, or the card reader that monitors who has come for their radiation was on the fritz. It was always something, but the worst it meant was fifty minutes instead of twenty-five. Who, after all we had been through, could complain about that?
The early-morning radiation sessions gave me the day to do what I needed to do. We had to plan our move back to North Carolina. We had to plan what the days would look like when we got there. Schools. Furniture. Summer camps. Jobs. What were we going to do? We knew John was going to work on poverty and work issues; it was like electricity, powering him, exciting him. He wanted to do three things: something real, something where he could see a policy translated into real terms; something academic, gathering the best minds, some of whom had advised him in the campaign; and something where he could advocate for change, using his skill communicating with people for this cause. I had seen him do this before—when Wade died, and later when he decided to run for the Senate—and I knew that when he set his mind to it, it would happen. He’d done it when I needed this care: he’d moved mountains. I had enough on my plate, but I wanted to be some part of this, even if it was just sitting in on the meetings, watching it unfold.
And that spring, it did unfold. The real program that will make a difference in people’s lives is set up. In a rural North Carolina county,